Cocaine's Son (5 page)

It was our last date. The more I thought about the tremendous burden this romance represented, the more it scared me. I was repulsed when I thought about myself and couldn’t bear to involve her in this disgusting fraud. I looked at my little boy’s hands and saw the lethal claws of a carnivorous beast.

Courtney started calling to ask why I wasn’t calling her. I never had a good answer. “Don’t worry,” I told her, “I still like you.”

In our last phone conversation, she sounded like she was going to cry. “Why did you do this,” she asked, “if you never really liked me?” I hung up because it was easier to run away. I went into my backpack and retrieved the love note, now creased and beaten from perpetual agitation, pocked by the pencils and uncapped pens it had been tossed among in my carelessness, and put it in the trash. When Courtney and I saw each other in classes or around the halls, we had a sensible reason for avoiding eye contact and keeping our interactions to an awkward minimum. And that’s how my cowardice ruined my first relationship.

After devoting many months to reconciling and rekindling their marriage, my parents decided their next project was to find a new home, a tidy suburban baptismal where they could wash away the frustrations and distress the city had imposed on them. From the answering-machine messages left by their real estate broker that I kept surreptitiously deleting, I learned that they had bought a house in northern New City, a locality that had attracted them not with a name that promised freshness and a new start but with the Ford dealership where they bought their first SUV. I had never seen the town, but as soon as I finished ninth grade, I would have to live there.

The verdict on my future arrived at a frustrating time, just as I was getting acclimated to the workloads that awaited me and the caste system that had built itself around me in my first year of high school; just as my spring-term position as the assistant manager of the girls’ softball team was getting me out of gym and into the company of several very tall, very strong young women; just as my nose decided it was going to grow away from my face as fast as it could and see if the rest of my body could keep up with it. The transition was social suicide, and I told none of my classmates or teachers that I wouldn’t be returning in the fall, savoring the shock and dismay I imagined they would feel when my absence occurred to them early the following September.

Somewhere on a yellow bus ride to my first day at a public school that I could have visited over the summer but petulantly chose not to, I remembered the other half of that equation: you don’t get to attend your own funeral, don’t get to hear your mourners lament your loss or wish aloud that they’d gotten to better know the scrawny smart kid who was terrible at dodgeball
and terrific at Super Mario Bros., and at some point everybody moves on. A new smart kid easily ascends to fill the void, and a new assistant manager for the girls’ softball team is as easily recruited.

In the short term, our family’s relocation seemed to help control my father’s drug problem. Now, at least for the hours of the day when he and my mother were angrily commuting back and forth to his Manhattan office, he had no opportunity to fuel his habit and no access to the people who supplied him or enabled him, the sullen faces and dingy, dimly lit places that encouraged him to cap off his grueling slog with a tasty, intoxicating line.

Our new home, with its alien enormity, had another unanticipated effect on our clan. While we lived in the city, we had been confined to an apartment that, though larger than any place I have since resided, made it impossible for us to go about our days without at least crossing paths in the hallway. The new dwelling offered a multitude of passages, escape routes, and personal chambers—a private bedroom for each of us, a surfeit of rooms to slip into at the sound of another person’s approaching footsteps—and we took advantage of them. We ate our meals at different times of day and retreated to our rooms quickly, while the big-screen television my father had purchased for the living room rattled the corridors with news of the Rodney King riots, the attempted-murder trial of Amy Fisher, and the failed reelection campaign of George H.W. Bush. Had you seen this house from the road or driven past it by accident at any hour of the evening, you would have had no idea it was occupied by people, let alone people who knew and loved one another, let alone a family.

My only respite from this tedious routine were the weekends, when there was so little to do around the house and so little to watch on television that my father would turn to me and ask, “Do
you want to learn how to drive?” We’d pile into his sedan or the SUV whose purchase was the first link in the chain that shackled us to the suburbs, and he would drive me out to the emptied high-school parking lot or a deserted end of a shopping center, perpetual reminders of my captivity, transformed into the training grounds for my escape.

As a teacher, my father had an unprecedented ability to memorialize and recall my errors of the past: his greatest concern was that I not repeat a mistake I made when I was ten years old and allowed for the first time to sit on his lap while he sat in the driver’s seat and I accidentally steered the car into the tiniest of fender benders; he made me practice jamming on the brakes over and over until he was confident that I would do the same in a real-life panic situation. But once he allowed me to let the car gain some momentum, my father was also a remarkably patient tutor, who showed me repeatedly how the car handled differently when it was shifted in reverse and I was looking through the rear windshield, until I understood it as inherently as he did. If I drove too fast, his only instruction to me was to silently depress his palm, as if pushing down a column of air, and if I scraped the car against some stationary object, he would only look at me and grimace, as if to say,
Don’t do that again
.

He never fully explained why it was so important that I become a proficient driver as quickly as possible; he never needed to. In his prouder moments, he would say things like “Do you know you’re already a better driver than your mother? She’s been driving for thirty years, and she’ll never understand it like you do.” In a moment of sudden forlornness, he would confess to me that when he was growing up, he never had a car of his own, and he vowed not to repeat that mistake in raising me. “As soon as you get your license,” he would say, “I’ll take you to the dealership and
you can pick out any new car you want.” On one condition: “Just don’t drive into the city until I first show you how to handle it.” What did I care about that particular restriction so long as I had the ability to leave this town in any other direction and never return?

There was one occasion not too long after when he asked me to violate his self-imposed taboo. It was a Saturday, the kind of day on which my father might otherwise be furthering my automotive education if he were around. But I hadn’t seen or spoken to him since the previous day. He called me that afternoon.

“David,” he said in a voice that was thin and shaky, like radio static. “I’m in the city. I need you to come and get me.”

“Oh God,” I said. “You went and got high, didn’t you?”

He was ashamed, as always, but not too ashamed this time to admit it. “Yes,” he answered.

“I can’t believe you,” I told him. “You make all this progress, and then you just throw it away. You’re right back at square one, do you realize that?”

No reply.

Though I would have loved nothing more, at age fifteen, to get behind the wheel of a car without a license and drive all the way into the city, and to have told anyone who might have tried to impede my mission that I was doing it on my father’s incontrovertible orders, I answered him in spite: “I’m not coming to pick you up. You figure out how to get home.”

It would have suited me fine if my father never returned to the house. But by that same afternoon he was back, transported by a Good Samaritan who had found him on the streets of Manhattan and who, miraculously, drove him all the way back to New City without promise of reward or remuneration when my father, no less miraculously, was able to remember the directions back to
his house under the influence of cocaine. He went straight to his bed and fell fast asleep. His mysterious benefactor phoned our house for three straight days to make sure he was all right, until he finally took the hint from the unanswered messages and stopped calling.

In the meantime, I was woken early the next morning by my father, who was already out of bed and crashing hard after his previous day’s intoxication, lecturing my mother loudly on a subject that I soon deduced was me.

“You have raised an awful,
awful
child, Maddy,” he hollered. “Who treats a person in need that way? You wouldn’t treat a
dog
that way. You don’t kick a dog when he’s down. Well, let me tell you something, Maddy, he is
done
in this family. Finished! He is
cut off
from now on. I’m not giving him anything, and I don’t want your mother helping him out, either. He is not to receive one cent from her. Not
one red cent
!”

I wondered if he realized that I could hear him through the whole horrible oration, the stomp of every angry word as it made its way up the stairs, forced itself past my bedroom door, and into my ears. Did he know that this particular lesson was having as much an impact on me as his many months of driving instruction? Did he know that as I heard him, even as I was motionless and wrapped underneath my bedcovers, I was vowing to myself to never again be put in a position where I would have to depend on my father for anything? In any case, our irate promises, both spoken and unsaid, did not remain intact for very long.

At my new school, I had a teacher in a late-period class who did not observe the traditional adult custom of ignoring how the fickle hands of puberty had molded my nose into an elongated and misshaped form: he who used to call me “protractor.” It might even have been a nickname I came up with and told him he
could call me because it was easier to take than any of the other titles he’d given me. On an evening in the fall of my first term, my mother and father were introduced to him at a parent-teacher night—some harmless little ritual that my parents came home from in tears.

I was sitting at the computer playing videogames when my father approached me and fell to his knees.

“David,” he said with great trepidation, “have you ever wanted to do anything—you know—about—you know—your nose?”

“What do you mean, Dad?” I knew what he meant, of course, but I wanted to know what had finally compelled him to ask me about it now.

“There was this one teacher tonight,” he said, and I immediately knew which one he meant. “He really likes you, he thinks you’re just a terrific student. And he sat me and your mother down, and he said, ‘I want you to know I think David’s a great kid. He’s adjusting fine so far. He’s doing well in class and starting to make some friends. Now all he needs is a nose job.’

“David,” he continued, “if your mother and I paid for it, would you—you know—want to get one?”

I knew my adolescence had made me ugly, and now that I knew my parents knew it also, there was no point in denying myself the remedy that would correct it. In a rite of passage as familiar as any bar mitzvah, I waited out the rest of the school year so I could have my nose job at the start of the summer, putting off the road test that would earn me my driver’s license to instead spend several days convalescing, drinking orange juice and laughing at pictures of Ringo Starr, whom I no longer resembled.

Before my junior year of high school, I had picked out an event as my coming-out party, the debut of the new me and my emergence into properly adjusted teenagerdom. My new face had secured
me an invitation to a summer party by a girl in my social studies class named Ellen Greenfield, a skinny, sweet little princess with long raven hair and the tiniest of bumps in her nose. (My theory at the time, confirmed by later events, was that she was conducting research for a future plastic-surgery procedure of her own.) The party was a no-parents-allowed affair that her parents were paying for, at a restaurant that was within groping distance of the suburban purgatory I had been confined to all these months, whose remote location had never done me any good until now.

I thought I would finally get to be brave, the way I’d always imagined I could be brave. If I could envision myself as a confident person, without constantly calculating the pitfalls, without being perpetually distracted by visions of the ways in which things could go wrong—if I didn’t even know that events could turn out otherwise, I could will them to be so. I could see myself being the center of attention at the festivities, the subject of a newfound curiosity—a curiosity that I would parlay into admiration, which I would then use to get Ellen all alone, win her over with my resurgent confidence, and then—and then—well, I wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen next. All I needed to set this plan in action was a ride to the party.

That same summer, my father became embroiled in a feud with my mother’s side of the family. Her father, my grandfather, had suffered a terrible fall and broken his hip, and this time it wasn’t a fall he was going to recover from. My grandmother was too old and infirm to take care of him, and there was no clear consensus about what should be done with him. My mother and grandmother were leaning toward moving him into a nursing home; my father was strongly opposed. He became so consumed with my grandfather’s fate that he could not find the time to bring himself
to work because he was in a perpetual state of argument with my grandmother. From anywhere in the house, I could hear the muffled sounds from my parents’ bedroom of his feverish telephone debates with an enfeebled woman believed to be at least eighty years old and who sometimes mixed up the names of her own children.